Ludwig von Bucholtz’s rare 1859 re-issue of the landmark four-sheet Herman Böÿe Map of Virginia. For all its flaws the best map of the state of its day, utilized by both the Confederate and Union armies.

The map depicts Virginia along with portions of adjacent states, with Virginia counties delineated by very faint dashed lines. The map delineates areas of elevation (albeit imprecisely, by means of hachuring), the courses of rivers and streams, and the state’s road network, with distinct line forms for stage roads, turnpike roads, “common roads”, finished and unfinished canals, and finished and unfinished railroads. Superimposed on this framework are thousands of symbols indicating towns, mills, minerals, “manufactories”, “iron works”, academies and colleges”, “houses of public worship”, and “places remarkable for military incidents”.

Around the map Böÿe, and Buchholtz after him, used almost every square inch of free space to provide detail of the state, with an extensive key; text blocks on magnetic variation; the sources employed and methods used in compiling the map; “Geological Remarks”; two statistical tables on population, the second arranged by county; and a table of latitudes and longitudes—in short a wealth of information for the user.

Close comparison of this map with the original four-sheet map published in 1827 confirms that they are from the same plates. Buchholtz however added an enormous amount of information, including but not limited to new counties and updated county boundaries; roads, canals, and railroads; and numerous place names. At top center Buchholtz eliminated two tables obscuring a large portion of central Pennsylvania and filled in the geography in some detail.

The map is held by the expected institutional collections, including the Library of Congress, Library of Virginia, University of Virginia and Duke University, but it is only rarely found on the antiquarian market.

Background
With the rapid expansion of its population in the early nineteenth century, the Virginia General Assembly planned to develop the interior to serve the needs of the inhabitants and maximize the economic benefits for the state. This being the age of the canal, the Assembly wanted to expand the road network and introduce canals to link the agricultural and industrial production centers with their markets.

To assist in the planning of this dramatic state-funded expansion, the state needed a proper understanding of the geography of the state so, to that end on February 27, 1816, the General Assembly passed “An Act to provide an accurate chart of each county and a general map of the territory of this Commonwealth”. The state appointed a surveyor, John Wood; when Wood died prematurely in 1822, he was succeeded by Herman Böÿe, who saw the project to completion. Henry Tanner of Philadelphia engraved two versions of the map—a mammoth version on nine sheets and a “reduced” edition on four—and both were published in 1827.

This was a time of rapid change for Virginia, so Böÿe’s maps were soon out-of-date, but it was only in 1849 that the General Assembly authorized the Board of Works to update them. The Board employed Claudius Crozet (1789-1864), a French engineer and artillery officer, who had emigrated to the United States and had taken post at West Point.[1] Busy with other important projects in Virginia, Crozet

“… turned to two emigrant Hungarian army Captains to assist him: Anthony Kanalassi and William J. Vaisz. Kanalassi collected data for the map of internal improvements and Vaisz acquired boundary survey data for those 42 counties created since the publication of the 1826 map. Additionally, Crozet worked with officers of the United States Coast Survey on proper latitude and longitude measurements and with Virginian civil engineer Andrew Talcott on certain astronomical observations. Upon Kanalassi’s death in 1852, German artillery and ordinance officer Ludwig von Buchholtz was hired as his replacement.³

Buch(h)oltz had been a German artilleryman, but virtually nothing else is known of him, beyond his role in editing the two Böÿe maps and authorship of a popular military manual, advertised as Buchholtz’s Infantry camp duty, field, fortification and coast defences (1860). An advert for the manual in the Richmond Dispatch describes him as “Captain Buchholtz, of this city, a gentleman who has seen service on the continent of Europe and who is an accomplished officer.” (Oct. 23, 1860, p. 2) The manual was later reissued for use of the Confederate Army by Richmond bookseller Joseph Williamson Randolph, whose name also appears on the label of the pocket folder housing the map offered here.

While undoubtedly the best cartographic depiction of Virginia then available, Buchholtz’ updated versions of Böÿe’s maps were handicapped by the parsimony of the General Assembly and/or the Board of Works: Rather than sponsoring a completely new map, they insisted that the original printing plates be re-used and the additions and corrections be added to them. The resulting map is very crowded and, even more significantly, lacks the kind of topographical information that would be needed by leaders on both sides of the looming Civil War.

As a result, “… Ludwig von Buchholtz and his team (thanks to the constraints put on by the Virginia General Assembly) ultimately failed to produce an accurate and useful map of the Commonwealth” (North). Indeed, the Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute wrote that “bill appropriating $8000 under the plan of Mr. Buckholtz might as well direct so much money to be thrown into the James River.”[2] This may be a little strong: Whatever the map’s drawbacks, at least one Union officer later wrote that the map was “the best for military purposes of any map available in the Federal Army.”

References
Richard Stephenson & Marianne McKee, Virginia in Maps, pp. 121-123. OCLC #43168391 et al, giving perhaps 14 institutional holdings of the four-sheet edition. William Wooldridge, Mapping Virginia, p. 219 and map #199 describe the nine-sheet edition, but not the four-sheet offered here. Not in Phillips, List of Maps of America (though the Library of Congress holds at least one example). Background from Walter Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers, pp. 121-123 and Peter North, ““The best for military purposes of any map available”: The Ludwig von Buchholtz revisions to the Wood–Bőÿe map and the Civil War”, online at “The UncommonWealth: Voices from the Library of Virginia”. Though he doesn’t address this particular edition of the map, William Wooldridge’s, “The Bucholtz-Ludwig Map of Virginia and Its Successors, 1858-1868”, in The Portolan #68 (Spring 2007) is worth reading for background.

[1] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/crozet-claudius-1789-1864/

[2] Francis H. Smith to Bolivar Christian, Staunton Va., Dec. 28, 1859, VMI Archives, on line. Cited in Wooldridge, “The Bucholtz-Ludwig Map of Virginia and Its Successors, 1858-1868”, in The Portolan #68 (Spring 2007), p. 26.